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When Parents Remarry (Each Other)

By Lisa Belkin May 12, 2010 5:47 pmMay 12, 2010 5:47 pm

Ross Kenneth Urken is going to a wedding next week. His parents’. There aren’t many etiquette books that cover this one. And the bride and groom aren’t the only ones whose history is being rewritten with remarriage.

Happily Divorced
By Ross Kenneth Urken

My divorced parents, in a delightfully absurd twist, will remarry each other on May 23 — 28 years after their original wedding day. All told, their relationship arithmetic traces the route of an irregular cardiogram: 22 years of marriage, 4 years of divorce (during which my father briefly married another woman), 2 years of dating each other again. Now this beautiful, strangely soap-operatic turn.

During a college summer I spent in France three years ago, my mother confessed to me by telephone (amid gossipy gum-chewing pops) that she and my father had reconnected. She whispered the news giddily as if to one of her girlfriends at lunch.

“Dad and I have started to … go out again,” she said, her voice jumping a dozen decibels.

“Citizens of Aix-en-Provence,” I wanted to scream, “my parents may be going steady!”

In all earnestness, I was thrilled but maintained a degree of skepticism. After all, I was dealing with a strange member of the Jewish Mother species (Mater iūdaeica), who explained her biggest problem with my father now proved taxonomical: how to classify each other socially.

“So what do you call yourselves?” I wondered in clinical disbelief.

“Dad introduces me as his ‘ex-ex-wife,’” she said. And then as if that weren’t enough: “You should see the looks we get!”

My mother delighted in the awkwardness; we come, indeed, from a strange breed of emotional masochists. At the very least, my parents agreed to be “happily divorced.”

Because precisely labeling them —“ex-ex-spouses” or “boyfriend and girlfriend”—was ultimately impossible, perhaps in the age of Facebook, pithiness would group them under “It’s Complicated.” Such is the title of that Alec Baldwin/Meryl Streep flick about a man rekindling a relationship with his ex-wife — appropriately timed this year for my parents. The film comes under the tagline “Divorced … with benefits,” and as much as I’d like to relegate that appraisal to a Nancy Meyers script, I find my parents’ iteration of this drama unfolding right in their living room — life imitating art, with a Jewish suburban flourish.

Come the re-wedding, I will serve as the ring bearer, my sister, Nicole, the flower girl. The wedding announcement this winter piqued my interest in the origin of my parents’ first marriage, and my inquiries proved that the odds for my parents’ meeting and subsequent nuptials — and decision to reproduce me — were slim.

They were introduced in their early 30s by Cheryl, a mutual friend living in Princeton, N.J., where my father had taken over his family’s mom-and-pop hardware store. When my mother entered the shabby establishment — screws loose in bins, light fixtures uneven — she had an immediate distaste for the curly-haired man behind the counter shooting one-liners to customers: jokes about golf, getting into heaven, erections.

“What is this, some kind of haberdashery?” went her aside. My father, not hard of hearing, told me he “had zero chance.”

My mother would marry a nice Jewish doctor or lawyer, she insisted throughout her 20s. Someone upstanding in society. Certainly not a man with an awkwardly alliterative name like Irvin Urken who sold sprocket wrenches.

But a successful yenta Cheryl would make, as my father’s spirit won over my mother’s prim hauteur. Five months later after a birthday party in Murray Hill, my parents walked to the bar at the Beekman Tower Hotel.

“We were a little drunk,” my father admitted. “The proposal just kind of came out.” There across the street from the United Nations, my father entered into nuptial diplomacy; without a ring and foregoing genuflection, he had successfully asked for my mother’s hand.

They married a year later, had my sister two years after the wedding and me 23 months after that. One form of ineffective birth control, then another, joked my father.

The two joined forces to run the hardware store. The screaming matches were inevitable, as all marital relationships veer martial when couples do business. Arguments escalated during recessions, and my family’s collective sanity could be predicted by the grade of retail sales. I spent many rheumy evenings shouting from my bedroom, “Stop yelling!”

Every Wednesday, Nicole and I would stay with our baby sitter while our parents had “date night.” It didn’t take long for an eavesdropping son to understand they were in weekly marriage counseling taking a clinical gaze at their compatibility.

As part of the underlying tension, the hardware shop fell victim to the encroaching big-box stores in the late ’90s. My father sneered at chain-corporation competition. “Our store,” as we called it, had roots; even Einstein had kept a charge account at Urken’s — pure genius. But steady sales of Weber grills proved insufficient compensation. In this preppy enclave where contractors shopped among Nobel laureates, the store stood in a precarious position. My paternal grandfather, a Lithuanian transplant to Princeton, had started the business as a glass shop — perhaps a more earnest allegiance to the fragility of retail.

And as with retail, marriage.

A Jewish marriage tradition has the groom stomp on a glass to remember, even in joy, the destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem and the shattering sorrows of life. Of course, the old quip indicates this is the last time a groom gets to put his foot down (true for my father, who used a halogen bulb from the store for dramatic breakage). But mystical Judaism offers a retrieval of happiness in the midst of this shattering: the Jewish concept of tikkun olam (“repairing the world”) holds that God extracted part of his essence into containers of light when creating the world, and in a shattering of vessels similar to the wedding glass, these shards are considered light held within the material of creation. Despite demolition, it is possible to reunite these sparks in repair.

When my parents decided to shatter their marriage, I was 17 and the only kid at home with my sister off at college. I packed up my childhood bedroom (paperbacks, snow globes) into crenellated cardboard boxes and, my bangs drooping in teenage whimsy, transferred my status from day to boarding student at my prep school.

My family put its house in a cul-de-sac neighborhood on the market; my father moved to a dingy apartment, my mother into a town house. My parents had a civil divorce and then a Jewish one. At school, I lived in a house with six other seniors and began my first true relationship beyond the piddling summer romance or two; at Lawrenceville, members of the opposite sex could only enter each other’s rooms during specified parietals periods, checking in with a dorm “duty master” and keeping doors open at a 90-degree angle. She was a beautiful rower who wore Doc Martens combat boots. This relationship was an education of its own, free from the fighting I thought endemic to love.

A year after my parents split, my father met another woman through Cheryl (yenta squared). My mother got professional headshots and took to the shaky pastures of JDate. She suffered a number of bad internet set-ups (decrying the pool “slim pickin’s”) and had a Sex and the City-esque group of divorcées who drove to Meat Packing District clubs like Milk and Honey: think dish sessions and stilettos. My sister took the brunt of mom’s lonely calls when even marital mediocrity stood preferable to solitude.

With added perspective into my parents’ struggles, I think of my own nuptial desiderata and believe all children, particularly at the precarious dating time of their 20s, should interrogate parents about marriage. In college I entered a relationship with a stunning ecology and evolutionary biology major with long, Coca-Cola-black hair. When she studied abroad in Panama for a semester our junior year, I found myself so lovesick that I overcame a crippling aviophobia and took a flight — my first in seven years — on a snowy March evening. I remember looking at the ice frozen over the wings, popping a Xanax and thinking in the face of doom, Well, if I make it, I’ll be with her.

Though I avoided talk of the future, I found us post-graduation moving into a one-bedroom in Alphabet City — a quaint sublet with antique Ottomans, French doors, and a collective backyard where we hosted dinner parties. Every month I wrote her a $750 check for half the rent, annotated with sweet nothings. We were 22 and ruefully ignorant of the hurt we would endure. She decided to get her Ph.D. in neurobehavioral biology in Philly, and I threatened to move to Berlin to finish my novel; the uncertainty of the future — the unwillingness to commit after three years — catalyzed doubt that we could make it, her resentment, my defensiveness. She brought her plan to fruition but not before a melodramatic breakup where she lugged a suitcase of her belongings out last May. We still had our laundry mixed in a basket together, and I remember doing it that evening — overpouring cups of Tide — as a way of cleansing our soiled rapport.

I would soon find a new girl, a stunning actress of the musical-theater variety, who sat across from me this past July 4 weekend on the crowded Hampton Jitney. I was taking up an extra seat with my beach bag, and she gave me a curious glance of disdain. We guessed each other’s names before a slew of remarkable banter ensued (I jest to this day we spoke in iambic-hexameter couplets). She told me she was from Oklahoma, and I asked if she was joking. We Facebooked each other. Met for wine in Little Italy. Strolled by the Seaport. We entered an intense long-distance relationship between her Hell’s Kitchen place and mine in Crown Heights. Somewhere around the time I woke up in her native Oklahoma City this Christmas, I became fully cognizant of the seriousness of our relationship — and tried to rationalize the coinkidinks and who-whudda-thunks that engendered its origin. We had created a no-I-love-you-more bond. It is my parents’ struggles and transcendence of them, though, that gives me pause and trepidation toward relationships yet belief in the enduring power of love.

My parents stayed connected throughout their divorce, taking demonstrative pride in the prestigious educations of their two children — bumper stickers, sweatshirts. They’d meet at parent weekends, talk tuition and logistical matters.

When the reconciliation began, I still do not know exactly: my father started to bring flowers and, at some point, moved into the town house. Such stories cannot be chronicled precisely, placed in a system of causes and effects, but their re-love seems to have had the same onset pattern of sleep: gradually and then all at once. My parents had enough history to weather the mishegoss of divorce and explore the possibility of a relationship once again. Emotional history does not go away. It’s relentless. In the face of all the “it’s complicated” status my parents may face in their second go at marriage, they are fearlessly moving forward. In shattering their collective vessel — the shards painful, the original destroyed — they were able to create something else luminescent in rebuilding.

About

We're all living the family dynamic, as parents, as children, as siblings, uncles and aunts. At Motherlode, lead writer and editor KJ Dell’Antonia invites contributors and commenters to explore how our families affect our lives, and how the news affects our families—and all families. Join us to talk about education, child care, mealtime, sports, technology, the work-family balance and much more